college value

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON (CA) Predicted grad rate: 47% Actual grad rate: 50% Net price: $3,489 Reason it made the cut: CSUF ranks eighth in the nation for bachelor’s degrees awarded to minority students, according to the magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. After expanding its enrollment cap in 2003, CSUF grew rapidly and is […]

The Washington Monthly ranking of America’s best community colleges is based on two sources of information: the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) and U.S. Department of Education measures of student retention and completion. The CCSSE survey is managed by a nonprofit organization of the same name housed at the University of Texas at […]

Our exclusive list of schools that help nonwealthy students attain marketable degrees at affordable prices.

To see our full list of rankings, click here. Eight years ago, the Washington Monthly published its first annual college rankings. Back in 2005, America was still operating under a compact with its citizens, colleges, and universities that had stood for the better part of the previous hundred years. The taxpayers would invest in basic […]

In this year’s rankings, we show which schools get their students over the finish line at a reasonable price.

A Different Kind of College Ranking

There are two primary goals to our methodology. First, we considered no single category to be more important than any other. Second, the final rankings needed to reflect excellence across the full breadth of our measures, rather than reward an exceptionally high focus on, say, research. Thus, all three main categories were weighted equally when […]